HOLOTYPE
One canonical plate per specimen.
The plate is the genotype, an immutable on-chain record that any image model can express through the published transcription guide. Official creature art will never exist, because the identity lives in the genes, and the genes keep every render recognizably kin.
Three models reading the same genome · clash harmony · 7 shapes · asymmetric · sine
Whitelist
Sign up for the mint.
HOLOTYPE mints on Robinhood Chain. Supply is 20,000 plates at 0.005 ETH each, with no per-wallet cap. Minting opens in three tiers, and each tier's window lasts two hours.
Signing up here places your wallet in tier 2. Connect an Ethereum wallet and sign one message, with no transaction and no gas. The signature proves the address is yours, and the list is snapshotted at mint.
Lexicon
- specimenone token in the collection, one entry in the registry, the thing you own
- platethe specimen's canonical artwork, drawn from its genes, all plates share the same structure
- geneone visible trait on the plate, from harmony class to the Σ marker
- creaturethe organism the genes encode, which has no official image
- renderany model's depiction of the creature, known as a paratype, infinite and unofficial
- soulthe on-chain persona file a minted paratype carries, derived from the same genes and readable by any agent harness
The Genotype
Every gene is visible on the plate.
Five swatches, one to seven primitives, a line pattern, and a Σ marker derive deterministically from a 32-byte seed. Harmony class, symmetry, body plan, temperament, and habitat all fall out of the visual itself, and the rarity math is real. A radial, 7-shape, clash-harmony, fine-pattern, metallic genome occurs about once in hundreds of millions of derivations.
In taxonomy, the holotype is the one specimen a species' name is permanently attached to. The plate plays that role here, and every render is a paratype, a record rather than the reference.
The transcription, read off the plate
A natural-history field illustration of a single living specimen: an aggressive apex predator with dissonant warning coloration, native to tidal jungles where climates collide. It has a spined, angular anatomy built for thrust with 7 distinct limbs or appendages. Its form is visibly mutated and asymmetric, features drifting off-axis. Its surface is undulating fins and membrane frills at a medium scale. Its coloration follows this exact five-swatch palette: hsl(23, 86%, 62%), hsl(91, 76%, 69%), hsl(235, 80%, 79%), hsl(145, 76%, 85%), hsl(338, 82%, 92%). Presentation: square canvas, precise scientific plate style. The specimen floats alone at the center of a single uniform white field, hex color #f6f4ee, that fills the entire canvas edge to edge. No habitat, scenery, or backdrop. No frames, borders, or vignettes. No text, captions, or labels anywhere.
| gene | variations |
|---|---|
| harmony | analogous 32% · complementary 24% · triadic 16% · monochrome 10% · tetradic 10% · clash 8% |
| symmetry | asymmetric 55% · mirror 33% · radial 12% |
| shapes | 1–7 per plate, drawn from circle · square · triangle · diamond · ring · semicircle · bar · cross |
| waveform | solid 25% · dashed 20% · sine 18% · dotted 15% · zigzag 12% · steps 10% |
| pattern | 1–9 cycles, in coarse 38% · medium 44% · fine 18% tiers |
| saturation | muted 30% · standard 55% · vivid 15% |
| lightness | pale 25% · mid 55% · deep 20% |
| temperature | warm · cool · mixed, read from the swatch hues |
| Σ marker | 00–99, the checksum printed on every plate |
| rare events | gene doubling 1.00% · glitch mutation 0.75% · metallic swatch 0.50% |
weights verified over 100,000 sampled derivations
Breeding Without Contracts
Any two specimens produce a child you can compute by hand.
The crossover rule is published as plain text. Odd swatches come from parent A, even from B, symmetry degrades, and the child's Σ equals (ΣA + ΣB) mod 100. The rule reads only visible genes, so a child exists the moment anyone computes it, and a forged pedigree fails the same arithmetic.
The Vanishing Radial
Symmetry can never be bred back.
A child always takes the less symmetric parent's tier, so radial, the rarest form at 12% of mints, survives only through unbroken radial × radial pairings. One outcross makes the bloodline commoner forever. The studbook records the surviving pure lines.
Wild Genomes
Your wallet already hosts a specimen.
Every address on earth derives exactly one wild genome from keccak256("genome-wild:<address>"). A wild can never be minted, and it breeds with owned specimens under the same crossover rule. The dashed frame marks it feral. This one lives at Vitalik's address.
Wild-caught crosses are a lineage class of their own.
Stage Two — Paratypes & Souls
Mint the creature, and its soul comes with it.
After the plates, a second contract opens. Anyone can mint any render as a paratype token, which records its parent specimen, the model, and the guide edition. Paratypes are unlimited per specimen, so no render ever hardens into official art, and every paratype mint pays the specimen's holder, at a price the holder sets, 0.005 ETH by default. A plate is a claim on every expression of its genome, at your price.
Each paratype carries a SOUL.md, an on-chain text file that derives the specimen's temperament from its genes and records who minted the plate and who created the soul, plus one dedication line from its creator. An agent harness loads the file as its persona, so the creature is an agent that transfers with the token, and the file itself explains how to trace its keeper and custody from the chain. Bred children carry bred souls. A clash soul argues, and a glitch soul is unstable on purpose.
The paratype layer is permissionless by design. Fork the contract, deploy your own on the same genomes, or write a new guide that expresses the collection as something we never planned.
The Field Guide Is Unwritten
The mechanics are fixed and published.
The transcription guide is one reading of the genes, and it holds no special authority. Anyone can publish a new set of rules that expresses the same specimens through AI as something else entirely, a different creature style, a soundscape, an architecture, a game character. The genes stay fixed while the readings multiply.
- 01The genotype spec, transcription guide, breeding rule, and studbook are published as plain text that anyone can compute by hand or fork.
- 02No canonical render will ever exist, so the question of what a clashing, asymmetric, 7-shape genome really looks like stays permanently open.
- 03Every token gets more beautiful as image models improve, because the genome stays fixed and new expressions of it keep arriving.